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Howard Moody, Who Led a Historic Church, Dies at 91

The Rev. Howard R. Moody the longtime minister of the historic Judson Memorial Church, who hurled himself and his Greenwich Village congregation into roiling social issues, at one point helping women from around the nation get illegal abortions, died on Wednesday in Manhattan. He was 91.

The cause was pneumonia and complications of cancer treatment, his daughter, Dr. Deborah L. Moody, said.

Mr. Moody’s religious career began at 5, when he preached his family’s strict Baptist faith on a street-corner milk crate in Texas. It flowered during his 35-year ministry at Judson Memorial, a Romanesque landmark overlooking Washington Square built from 1888 to 1893 as a mission church to help the poor. For Mr. Moody, a more inclusive gospel and good works were priorities.

He started the first drug-treatment clinic in the Village and went out of his way to offer aid, and cookies, to prostitutes. He made his church the home of one of New York’s first Off Off Broadway theaters and an innovative dance company. A gallery he established there showed artists like Claes Oldenberg and Robert Rauschenberg before they were well known. Beatniks, and later hippies, were welcomed. In the 1960s he let Yoko Ono and others stage “happenings.” One event, called “Meat Joy,” featured bikini-clad performers and a dead fish.

When AIDS struck, Mr. Moody set up a support group. Soon he was presiding over one memorial service after another. He fought censorship and defended people who defaced the American flag. He became a leader of a local political club, the Village Independent Democrats, and helped topple the Democrats’ tainted district leader, Carmine G. DeSapio.

Mr. Moody — whose background as a Marine sergeant both puzzled and amazed some of the more radical members of his church — probably made his biggest impact on the issue of abortion. He believed that a pregnant woman should be able to decide the fate of an embryo or fetus herself.

Shortly after he arrived at Judson, in January 1957, to become senior pastor, a Florida woman took the train to New York to see him, hoping to get an abortion. Another minister had given her Mr. Moody’s name and he was able to guide her to a safe abortion.

A decade later, he had established a network of 21 ministers and rabbis to help pregnant women. He told The New York Times about what he was doing expressly to demonstrate that he was not hiding anything, and The Times ran an article about him on the front page on May 22, 1967. No one was arrested, nor was the operation shut down.

In 1967, Mr. Moody helped set up a national network of 1,400 clergy members to help women seeking abortions. Three years later, when New York State legalized abortion, he helped establish a clinic to guide to his state women who wanted safe legal abortions. After the United States Supreme Court legalized abortion in 1973, referrals from other states stopped, but Mr. Moody kept the clinic going to help poor New York women.

Photo

The Rev. Howard R. Moody of the Judson Memorial Church, in Greenwich Village, in 1961. He hurled himself into social issues.Credit
John Orris/The New York Times

Mr. Moody was a freethinking preacher. He questioned the veracity of some of the Bible and called the Resurrection “the cheap shot in Christian triumphalism.” What mattered, he said, were “the little dyings” by which lives are diminished.

But he never stopped talking about God, although he was loath to define him (or her, as he often said) for others. He pointed to modern artists and philosophers as spiritual guides.

“We used art and literature of the unbelieving world to drive our victims into some corner of existential despair where all answers failed, and then we slipped in God,” he wrote in 1965.

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Not adhering to church tradition was almost a point of pride. He removed the pews and pulpit from his church to make room for informal activities. He took down an 18-foot-high cross, explaining that Jews who came to services might think it implicitly condemned them as Christ-killers.

Howard Russell Moody was born in Dallas on April 13, 1921, and never lost his Texas twang. He attended Baylor University, a Baptist school, for two years to study for the ministry. But he had begun to doubt his direction, and in 1941, six months before Pearl Harbor, he enlisted in the Marines. He served for four and a half years as a photographer and gunner on a B-17 bomber in the South Pacific.

After contracting malaria, he was sent to a base in Santa Barbara, Calif., where he met Lorraine McNeill in a Baptist church. They were married for 68 years, and she survives him. Besides his wife and daughter, Mr. Moody is survived by a son, Daniel, and two grandsons.

Mr. Moody earned degrees from what is now the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Yale Divinity School. He was ordained at Judson in 1950 after helping to supervise the church’s summer youth program while at Yale. He was chaplain to students at Ohio State University before being called back to Judson in 1957.

His foray into Democratic politics ended at the party’s 1968 convention in Chicago, when he became disillusioned by its unwillingness to condemn the Vietnam War. He retired from Judson in 1992.

Mr. Moody hated what he considered mindless patriotism, and in a 1970 sermon took on fans at Yankee Stadium who had berated another fan for not taking off his hat during the national anthem.

“One fanatic patriot walked down and snatched off his hat and tried to put it in his hands,” the minister concluded. “But he didn’t have any hands — he had lost them in the war.”

Correction: November 3, 2012

An obituary on Sept. 14 about Howard Moody, the longtime minister of the Judson Memorial Church in Manhattan, referred incorrectly to the national network of clergy members that he helped set up. It was formed in 1967 to assist women seeking abortions — not after New York State legalized abortion in 1970, which is when Mr. Moody helped establish a clinic in New York to provide abortions to women from around the country. (A reader pointed out the error in an e-mail on Oct. 14.)

A version of this article appears in print on September 14, 2012, on Page A25 of the New York edition with the headline: Howard Moody, 91; Led a Historic Church. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe